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Sex & the symmetrical body

22 April 1995

By David Concar

FORGET the perfectly balanced bodies of a marble Adonis or Venus. In the world of real flesh, asymmetry rules. Hands, feet, ears, ankles, breasts – all can, and indeed do, differ in size or shape from one side of the body to another, if only by millimetres.

To our conscious selves, these small deviations from symmetry are seldom more than a source of mild irritation when trying on new shoes. But in the deeper recesses of our sexual psyche, in the barely conscious calculations we make to assess physical attractiveness, they may loom large. You see, asymmetrical flesh just isn’t sexy – or at least this is the message coming from research into the way deviations from perfect body symmetry influence success in the human mating game.

It may sound like a bizarre thing to investigate, but the biologists involved in the research couldn’t be more serious, or come with finer academic track records. To these researchers, “fluctuating asymmetries” (as the deviations are more formally known) are no mere physical flaws. Rather, they are central to understanding where some of our notions of physical attractiveness come from; to teasing apart the ingredients of beauty and asking if those ingredients are adaptive in a Darwinian sense; in short, to challenging the view that beauty is largely a cultural construct, and a male-dominated construct at that.

In the politically correct campuses of north America, such a quest demands no small degree of commitment. “This asymmetry stuff is so far out of the mainstream it’s hard to get funding for it,” says Randy Thornhill, a behavioural ecologist at the University of New …